Blogging has become a major motivator of social and political change in many parts of the world, as well as a source of information. Here on Global Voices, we curate and publicize some of these blogger voices and translate them into many different languages. A central goal of the community is to promote a cornucopia of perspectives and aspirations. For this reason, we support initiatives such as the Best of the Blogs awards.

Any person interested in nominating a blog, must first search for it in the BOBs blogopedia and submit the blog of their choice in the competition database if it is not already listed. The jury will select the finalists. Winners will be selected from this group of finalists between March 15 and April 14 through a combination of online voting and a jury selection.

On April 15, the winning blogs and podcasts will be announced at the Re:Publica Internet conference in Berlin [de]. The awards ceremony will take place at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in June 2010 in Bonn.

For bloggers, the BOBs is opportunity to conquer a broader audience and to be named one of the best bloggers on the Web. So far, there are 15,558 registered blogs in the blogopedia:

The Blogopedia is our international online catalogue of Weblogs, podcast and videoblogs. Each blog is entered into the database according to a variety of criteria from topic to country of origin to language. Looking for music podcasts in Brazil or food blogs in China? No problem! Just type your keywords into the search feature or browse through the categories and Tagcloud. Then join the thousands of other Bloggers who have submitted their blogs, podcast and videoblogs into the Blogopedia.

In this year's competition, climate change is under the spotlight, with a special prize category for blogs and podcasts discussing the topic. Additionally, the BOBs have also added Bengali (Bangla) to the line up of languages.